The same awakening of a national taste made itself felt in the native school of Dutch landscape—a landscape excellent in many ways, but cabin'd, cribbed, and confined, like their own dykes. "Of deities or virtues, angels, principalities, or powers, in the name of our ditches, no more. Let us have cattle, and market vegetables" (Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. vi. § 11). But the Dutch School of landscape had the qualities of its defects. "The Dutch began to see what a picture their country was—its canals, and boompjis, and endless broadly-lighted meadows, and thousands of miles of quaint water-side; and their painters were the first true masters of landscape for its own sake" (Pater, ib. p. 98).
FOOTNOTES:
[31] This statement, like all others in so short and general a summary as alone can be here attempted, is of course only broadly true.
[32] It is interesting to note that this spirit of anti-religious revolt is what fascinated Heine in Dutch pictures. "In the house I lodged at in Leyden there once lived," he says, "the great Jan Steen, whom I hold to be as great as Raphael. Even as a sacred painter Jan was as great, and that will be clearly seen when the religion of sorrow has passed away.... How often, during my stay, did I think myself back for whole hours into the household scenes in which the excellent Jan must have lived and suffered. Many a time I thought I saw him bodily, sitting at his easel, now and then grasping the great jug, 'reflecting and therewith drinking, and then again drinking without reflecting.' It was no gloomy Catholic spectre that I saw, but a modern bright spirit of joy, who after death still visited his old workroom to paint many pictures and to drink" (Heine's Prose Writings, Camelot Series, p. 67).
[33] "The Dutch painters were not poets, nor the sons of poets, but their fathers rescued a Republic from the slime and covered it with such fair farms that I declare to this day I like Dutch cheese as well as any, because it sends one in imagination to the many-uddered meadows which Cuyp has embossed in gold and silver. What savoury hares and rabbits they had in the low blunt sand-hills, and how the Teniers boor snared them, and how the big-breech'd Gunn-Mann (I haven't any knowledge of Dutch, but I am sure that must be the Dutch for 'sportsman') banged off his piece at them, and then how the shining Vrow saw them in the Schopp and bargained for them. The Schopp had often a window with a green curtain in it, and a basso-relievo of Cupids and goats beneath, with a crack across the bas-relief, and iron stains on the marble, and a bright brass bulging bottle on the sill, and such pickling cabbage as makes the mouth water" (Letters of James Smetham, p. 172).
[THE LATER FLEMISH SCHOOL]
The early history of the Flemish school has been already traced (pp. 38-41). The birth of its later period is almost exactly contemporaneous with that which has been described in the case of the Dutch school. In 1598 the Archduke Albert and his consort Isabel established what was almost an independent State in the Spanish Netherlands (= roughly Flanders, or the modern Belgium). The "Spanish Fury" was at an end, the Inquisition was relaxed. Albert and Isabel eagerly welcomed artists and men of letters, and the exuberant art of Rubens responded to the call. This is the third and great period in the Flemish school—the succession being carried on by Rubens's pupils, Van Dyck and Teniers. Rubens, the greatest master of the Flemish School, was born in 1577 in Germany, but brought up at Antwerp, then the depository of western commerce, and he coloured every subject that he touched with the same hues of gay magnificence. It is by his pictures, and those of Van Dyck, that this room is dominated, and it is unnecessary to anticipate here the accounts of those masters given below (pp. [111], p. [130]). They were painters of the Courts. The works of Teniers complete the picture of Flemish life and manners by taking us among the common people in country fairs and village taverns.